by Matt Thorne
If this had come out, would the show be remembered in the same way as the Syracuse 1985 performance or Dortmund 1988? No. Unlike almost all of the tours Prince undertook before this one, the Diamonds and Pearls tour has dated badly. The new songs sounded no more interesting onstage than they did on vinyl, and while the Lovesexy tour had offered a beautiful blend of the old and new, the hits he worked into the show (‘Let’s Go Crazy’, ‘Kiss’ and ‘Purple Rain’) can be found in almost any era. This line-up of the NPG – Levi Seacer, Jr, Sonny T, Tommy Barbarella, Michael B and Rosie Gaines – are an underrated group who in some ways were as interesting a band as Prince has ever played with, but they were surrounded by too many people: eleven other dancers, rappers and musicians (Tony Mosley, Damon Dickson, Kirk Johnson, Michael B. Nelson, Brian Gallagher, Kathy Jensen, Dave Jensen, Steve Strand, Mayte, Diamond, Pearl and DJ William Graves). This group had none of the gang mentality of either The Revolution or the Sign o’ the Times/Lovesexy bands, and the tour is only really worth seeking out by completists who want to hear live versions of the songs that didn’t carry through to later eras.
The male and female members of Prince’s band had never seemed as openly set in opposition as they were during this era. Every female onstage (with the exception of Rosie Gaines) was sexually objectified in a new way for Prince. And although Prince remained a sexually ambiguous figure throughout (when performing ‘Insatiable’ he was the one who was videoed and turned into a sex object, and he was lifted and tossed around by The Game Boyz), there was a new thuggery to some elements of his performance (a gun-shaped microphone, the way he introduced new song ‘Sexy MF’ by saying, ‘This one’s for all the whores’10) that didn’t particularly suit him. When his rappers are telling women in the audience how to dress – even as a joke – it immediately makes the skimpy costumes of Diamond, Pearl and Mayte seem less playful and more of an enforced uniform than Cat striding around in her underwear four years earlier. There were a few bright spots in the show, including Prince’s best ever, lengthy performance of ‘Thieves in the Temple’ (occasionally mashed up with lyrics from ‘It’). Sung in a peaked cap with chains over his face, he took this song to an even more emotional height than the already highly wrought studio version (the track, one of his very best, would disappear for ever after this tour). And he debuted several songs from his next album (‘My Name Is Prince’, ‘Sexy MF’ and ‘Damn U’) which, although driven by the same machismo and swagger as the show, were already irresistible.
The after-shows seemed uninspired too: for the most part, merely selections from the main show in a club setting. He didn’t play any during the London part of the European tour, but Chris Poole remembers Prince holding an after-party at Tramp, where guest Mick Jagger ‘had obviously had a couple of drinks and was in very merry mood, and grabbed hold of my leg and said, “Course, I knew her when she first started, y’know. I mean, she came on tour with us in stockings and suspenders, and I told her, “You’ll never get away with that.”’
Throughout this time, nightclubs and their denizens continued to be Prince’s prime source of inspiration. Tramp had become Prince’s favourite club during his London stay, and Poole remembers several occasions when he’d be getting ready to go to bed and his wife would hand him the phone and it would be Prince summoning him for a night out. ‘All he’d do was sit there gazing at the women on the dance floor. He had this thing where he’d watch, taking everything in. And I’d be bored rigid. Tramp at that time was definitely not the place to be. He used to drink … was it … Drambuie and blackcurrant … something vile … I remember he said, “Eddie Murphy told me this is the drink to drink.”’ Poole’s observation is echoed in Chris Heath’s profile, which noted he’d do the same thing in Minneapolis clubs, occasionally causing resentment. As Heath notes: ‘[The waitress said], “You’re always in clubs and you don’t drink, you don’t dance, you don’t do anything, you just sit in the corner …” [to which] his bodyguard said, “He likes to people watch.” [And she replied], “Why doesn’t he go people watch on a park bench?”’11
23
THE CHAINS OF TURIN
Generally, engineers who have worked with Prince in the later parts of his career tend to make quite similar observations – that he keeps unpredictable hours, that he’s impatient, that he’s extraordinarily skilled on a wide variety of different instruments – but some observations from Kyle Bess,1 who worked with Prince during this time, explain what seems like a drop-off in quality. The most significant change was Prince’s decision to start working with a programmer, Airiq Anest. Most Prince fans admire Anest, whose work, they suggest, is more complicated and imaginative than that of his successor, Kirk(y) J(ohnson), but for the most part, the music he worked on has not endured. Bess’s other pertinent observations suggest that Prince’s process of composition had become even faster, but also more fractured. So much so that Bess is not even sure what records he was involved with. The reason for Bess’s vagueness is partly because Prince would begin work in his Paisley Park studio and finish it with Bess at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, but also because he wouldn’t even give Bess titles to the songs they were working on, with the engineer logging tracks as ‘Thursday: groove’ or ‘New groove’ or ‘Sexy groove’ (presumably Prince frowned on the engineer using more imaginative titles).
The problem with writing about a living musician is that even more so than authors or film-makers, the availability of their work is in constant flux, with records being deleted and reissued, songs for some film or theatre projects being easy to find, and others largely disappearing when the movie or play fails. This, of course, is more the case with Prince than any other musician, and the music he wrote for I’ll Do Anything is another of the many frustrating gaps in the availability of Prince’s work that make full assessment of his achievements difficult. At the time of writing, the director of the film, James L. Brooks, has been talking about the possibility of releasing the original version, prompted by the critical opinion of Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of America’s most highly regarded film reviewers, who has said of that version (which contains nine Prince tracks) that ‘it is far and away James L. Brooks’ best movie, more than twice as good as what he finally released’.2 At first, Brooks commented that he wanted to make a documentary where he could be ‘honest about [his] own experience and tell the story of the first preview, where there were these massive walkouts, and then say, “and here’s the picture they saw that night,” and then show it … But we couldn’t get the rights to Prince’s songs – he had a caveat in his contract requiring his permission, and it was somewhere between not getting permission and not being able to get him on the phone.’3
The songs Prince wrote for the soundtrack of I’ll Do Anything include some of the worst tracks he’s ever recorded. The four songs that have been officially released from the project – ‘The Rest of My Life’, ‘My Little Pill’, ‘There Is Lonely’ and ‘Don’t Talk 2 Strangers’ – are all worthwhile and will be discussed later, and at one stage Prince considered giving ‘Empty Room’ – one of his finest songs – to the project. But ‘Poor Little Bastard’, seemingly written in response to the screenplay, has the distinction of being the worst song Prince has ever recorded. In such a huge catalogue of work, it is inevitable that some of it will be throwaway, offensive or misguided, but nothing else quite rivals this song. Many hard-core fans keep it on standby as a corrective when they’re getting too obsessed with Prince’s music, and indeed I have used it to temper my own enthusiasm for Prince’s music several times while writing this book.
Although the decision to change the film from a musical into a comedy was a result of a poor test screening rather than cold feet on director James L. Brooks’s part, how must the poor man have felt when Prince walked into his office, lifted up the piano lid and started wailing the song’s title? Nothing in the whole history of popular music can quite prepare you for the closing lines, in which Prince offers to be the poor little bastard’s papa. It’s beyond
awful, beyond self-parody, a song so bizarre and misguided it makes ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ seem sane. In an LA Times article from 1994, Chris Willman wrote about a camp cult that had grown up around the soundtrack, noting that one ‘astonished professional songwriter’ who played the album for friends observed: ‘No matter how bad anybody thinks the music would’ve been – and I was expecting it to be horrible – it’s worse. It’s like “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers.’4
Show tunes are not a genre that really suit Prince,5 and these songs are both overwrought and smarmy, with an odd insincerity. Willman singled out not ‘Poor Little Bastard’ but ‘Wow’ for particular abuse, a song that exists in six versions, including one sung by a woman while giving birth, but although generic, it’s an inoffensive upbeat squib. Far worse than ‘Wow’ is ‘Be My Mirror’, a song about fatherhood that could have only been written by a bachelor – what parent, no matter how virtuous, wants their child to mirror their behaviour? But the duet between Nick Nolte and Whittni Wright, whose performance even Rosenbaum describes as ‘creepy’, takes the song to new depths of horrendousness.
Rosenbaum has high praise for ‘I Can’t Love U Any More’, writing of Julie Kavner’s rendition that it’s both ‘the most beautiful and emotionally complex musical number’ and also ‘the most tormented, devoted to Hollywood hypocrisy at its worst’. Kavner is the voice of Marge Simpson, and it would be easy to mock her croaking, but there is something affecting about her delivery (the producers didn’t think so, bringing in Melissa Etheridge to record another version), though it can’t save what’s essentially a listless fragment.
‘I’ll Do Anything’, the lament of an artist desperate to please his audience, is the most compelling of the unreleased songs, particularly in Prince’s original lo-fi demo version, which turns into a spoken-word rap midway through and which, given Brooks’s butchering of his own film, seems deeply ironic. ‘Make Believe’ is lyrically less interesting, the title punning on the fantasy of films and TV and self-actualisation. Should Brooks get his wish and the film come out with the songs included, a reappraisal of the soundtrack might be necessary, but it seems unlikely that any of Prince’s contributions will ever be regarded among his best work.
*
Having observed him in close quarters, Chris Poole thinks that Prince ‘was going through a crisis throughout this period, because obviously rap had exploded and he had sort of been quoted saying he hated rap and didn’t want to get involved with it …’ Unlike Chuck D, Poole believes, ‘I don’t think Prince really understood rap. He was too far removed from the street at that point and it wasn’t musical in the conventional sense … and when he did get into rap the guys he got involved with weren’t very good, they were very second-rate.’ Many fans, critics and musicians share this opinion. Arthur Baker, who worked with several musicians who have also worked with Prince and who has supported him with DJ sets in concert, says that had Prince come to him, he could have found far better rappers for him to work with. While Prince would continue to be influenced by hip hop to a lesser or greater degree throughout his subsequent albums, the record represents the last point when (notwithstanding all the alternative projects he was involved with at the time) Prince focused all his energies on one album. A record that has aged better than Diamonds and Pearls and is more consistent than Graffiti Bridge (although lacking its highlights), it was nonetheless irredeemably damaged by Prince’s last-minute tinkering. It is not unusual for musicians to do damage to their albums by withdrawing the record’s strongest songs at the last minute (this is a common complaint of critics when discussing Bob Dylan records,6 and indeed Prince – in his guise – would do something similar when he removed ‘Days of Wild’ from The Gold Experience), but with the problem was that Prince added a song at the last minute, ‘Eye Wanna Melt with U’, which necessitated the removal of the spoken segues that he had originally included in what he referred to as a rock soap opera. The removed segues don’t entirely resolve the album’s complex storyline or explain its symbolism, but they do make the record possible to follow. Prince had often been interested in giving his albums a narrative, and the idea of a concept album was hardly new, but there’s an intriguing parallel between this record and NWA’s second album Efil4zaggin (1991) (Prince doffs his cap by sampling that record’s ‘Niggaz 4 Life’ on the song ‘Arrogance’), which also features imaginary TV news reporters. Chuck D famously referred to rap as ‘the black CNN’, and the journalistic nature of rap music was frequently emphasised as an important part of its appeal, which may have shaped Prince’s initial approach to his construction of this record. But the record is far more surreal and convoluted than any rap album.
*
In its complete form, is Prince’s most conceptually ambitious album, an achievement to place alongside Emancipation and The Rainbow Children in its attempt to move beyond a suite of songs to make a unified grand statement, with a more intricate narrative than his past feature films, the story laid out in an accompanying video movie and comic, as well as on the album. It’s also unusual in that, on one level at least, it seems a remarkably candid attempt to dramatise an ongoing love affair – although, as always with Prince, it’s not quite that simple. For a record which addresses Prince’s complex relationship with the press, it seems to give up an enormous amount of personal information. But it’s also muddled and confusing, and untangling the record all these years on feels vaguely embarrassing, like adumbrating the plot of some long-forgotten children’s programme.
On the original, unreleased version of the record, the opening segue sets up the action: it’s Minneapolis, 1997, and a five-year-old boy named Michael is digging in the dirt when he finds three gold chains, for which he abandons his purple ball. Meanwhile, down the street at Paisley Park, Prince and the NPG are beginning a concert tour in which they are going to play ‘an opera of entirely new music’.7 Among the journalists covering the event is Vanessa Bartholomew, played – as on the few snatches of segues that did make it onto the record – by Kirstie Alley. Michael shows the chains to his mother, Princess Mayte, and it sparks a memory of five years earlier, although exactly what she’s remembering is not clear. The 3 Chains o’ Gold film, directed by Parris Patton, Randee St. Nicholas8 and Prince in his ‘Paisley Park’ guise, adds a more disturbing prologue: set in Cairo, shots of Princess Mayte swimming with four naked handmaidens is intercut with footage of her father being stabbed to death, before she takes the three chains of Turin and flees to Minneapolis. And the Three Chains of Gold (sic) comic book that Prince commissioned the late Alter Ego author Dwayne McDuffie9 to write offers yet another variation on the central narrative (and on the significance of the chains), with a character named Tammuz explaining to his brother that the owner of the three chains of gold will be the ruler of ‘Eridu, capital city of Erech, somewhere in the Middle East’. At the beginning of the comic, Tammuz, Mayte and Tammuz’s brother all have one of the three chains. Tammuz’s brother then kills him and goes in pursuit of Mayte to steal hers.
But on the album as released, there’s a shout-out for Prince and The New Power Generation and it’s straight into ‘My Name Is Prince’, another of Prince’s narcissistic celebrations of his own talent. In the second verse, he talks about having a dual personality, something which seems to have developed from being merely part of his creative persona to something he believed (or pretended to believe) wholeheartedly during this era. As he later explained, seemingly straight-faced, to Oprah Winfrey while promoting Emancipation: ‘Recent analysis has proved that there’s probably two people inside of me, just like a Gemini, and we haven’t determined what sex that other person is yet.’10
The artist may claim ‘My Name Is Prince’, but this song is quickly taken over by Tony M, in the first of the album’s three collaborations, as if the henchman is offering to hold his boss’s coat while he fights. The undercurrent of violence seems to come as much from Prince’s desire to create cinematic drama in his concept album as a need to compe
te with gangsta rap. The ‘Sexy MF’ is not Prince but a woman, and in spite of the profanity in the title, this seems at first a heavily toned-down version of Prince’s insatiable love tracks. Whereas the lust objects of ‘Extra Loveable’, ‘Lust U Always’ or ‘Irresistible Bitch’ would drive Prince into a frenzy, he is not only able to control himself in Mayte’s company, but driven to control her too. This is a song about mind-fuckery (or, to use the Steely Dan term later borrowed by Prince’s ex Susannah Melvoin for the title of the fDeluxe record, ‘gaslighting’). In the song Prince imagines isolating his lover in a villa on the French Riviera (in the video this lover is not Mayte but past Prince associate Troy Beyer), tells her she has to learn how to avoid fighting with him, promises to cook for her and threatens to bind, gag and blindfold her in preparation for their future marriage. Throughout the song he belittles her and dismisses her imagined concerns. Prince sings in a much deeper register than he usually uses, and the jazzy track seems to owe something to Herbie Hancock (the album’s final track, ‘The Sacrifice of Victor’, makes this connection more explicit by sampling The Headhunters’ ‘God Made Me Funky’11). Famously, this is also the video where Prince faux-humps his beloved yellow car, an automobile that he had been featuring in his movies since ‘Gett Off’.